1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to telecommunication systems, and more particularly, to resource management in telecommunication systems.
2. Related Art
Major cellular telecommunication system types include those operating according to the Global Services for Mobile (GSM) Standard, the TLA/EIA/IS-95 Mobile Station-Base Station Compatibility Standard for Dual Mode Wideband Spread Spectrum Cellular Systems (IS-95), the TIA/EIA/IS-136 Mobile Station-Base Station Compatibility Standard (IS-136), the TIA/EIA/IS-707 Spread Spectrum cdma2000 Standard (IS-2000), and the TIA/EIA 553 Analog Standard (AMPS/TACS). Other major cellular systems include, but are not limited to, those operating in the personal communications system (PCS) band according to the IS-95 based ANSI-J-STD-008 1.8-2.0 GHz standard, or those operating according to the GSM based PCS 1900 (1900 MHz frequency range) standard.
Currently, each of the major cellular system standards is implementing data services into its digital cellular specification. For most of the standards, the data service specifications have been finalized, or are being finalized.
One data service specification includes a radio link protocol (RLP) that is utilized to provide an octet stream service over forward and reverse traffic channels. The octet stream service carries variable length data packets of the point-to-point protocol layer. The RLP divides the point-to-point protocol packets into traffic channel frames for transmission. The traffic channel frames form the physical layer transmission frames. There is no direct relationship between the point-to-point protocol packets and the traffic channel frames. A large packet may span several traffic channel frames, or a single traffic channel frame may include all or part of several point-to-point packets. The RLP does not take the higher level traffic channel framing into account but operates on a featureless octet stream, delivering the octets to the system multiplex sublayer for transmission in the order the octets are received from the point-to-point layer. The data may be transmitted on the traffic channel as primary traffic or, for example, along with speech, as secondary traffic. The RLP generates and supplies one frame to the multiple sublayer every 20 milliseconds (ms). The size of the RLP frame depends on the type and size of the transmission frame available for transmitting the RLP frame.
The foregoing is but one example of the data transmission protocol layer in a major cellular system standard, for use in transmission of data and data packets. Other standards also have similar data transmission protocols used for transmission of data packets.
The majority of the data transmission protocols include a finite timer for insuring data transmission sessions do not dominate system resources. For example, once a data transmission session is established, the timer is activated to measure an amount of time elapsed between consecutively received/transmitted data packets. That is, after a first packet is received/transmitted, the finite timer is started. If a subsequent packet is not received/transmitted before the timer expires, the telecommunication system will terminate the data session in favor of freeing up resources for use by other data or speech sessions.
Although the use of a timer in telecommunications systems insures system resources are not unnecessarily dominated by one or more data sessions, the use of a uniform timer does not take in consideration data sessions that may have packets that are generated in a substantially periodic nature. Such data sessions may include but are not limited to heart beat retrieval systems that access weather, traffic, stock, etc., information. Typically, these types of data sessions require a very small amount of time for packet transmission, which leads to a data session being unnecessarily maintained until a finite timer value expires.